Development of a Novel Conversational Calculator Based on Remote Online Computation

This paper presents a way to improve the current situation by introducing a newly developed computational tool that is capable of speech recognition and voice output and includes a keypad-free user interface, resembling a Smartphone message box, to enhance human-machine interaction experience. Furthermore, it relies on effectively offloading computation to a remote online service. The main ideas behind this paper are the possibility of transforming tangible daily tools into specially designed interface agents that enable voice communication with users, and the possibility of utilizing available online information databases and well as online services that rely on remote machines instead of utilizing local computation. An important novelty of the presented work is also the fact that it was designed on the basis of empirical data arising from an appropriate Wizard-of-Oz-like experiment that was performed with almost one hundred people, and thus high-quality recognition of commonly occurring natural language queries was achieved.